Yesterday Brown and Columbia took down favored Yale and Cornell teams. Earlier in the day we talked about how these were games the Bulldogs and Big Red needed to win to have any chance of contending in the league. It sounds weird to count out teams two or three games into the league schedule, but yesterday’s results pretty much put the kibosh on Yale’s and Cornell’s seasons.
Dramatic turnaround in Providence
Yale completely destroyed Brown in the two teams’ first meeting last weekend in New Haven, with the scoreboard reading 69-40 when the Bulldogs emptied the bench with under six minutes left. So how does a team go from dominating an opponent like that, to giving up a 17-2 run and losing to that same team seven days later? Given these results and the recent history of the series, the answer seems pretty obvious: the Brown coaching staff got the better of their Yale cohorts. Since Glen Miller and James Jones came into the league together in the spring of 1999, their programs have locked horns 14 times. Miller owns a 10-4 edge in those games. This is the fourth season in a row that the Bulldogs have lost at least once to the Bears before their first Ivy weekend. In 2001-02 Yale was able to overcome a season-opening loss to Brown at home and win a share of the Ivy title, but losing to Brown back then wasn’t a bad loss. Brown’s RPI ranking has dropped every single season since then — from 120th that season to 146th in 2002-03 to 209th in 2003-04 to 229th last season to its current rank of 281st this year. This season the Bears are one of three Ivy teams that have really struggled to date, and it’s a pretty safe bet that the Ivy champion will not lose to one of these teams. Therefore, after yesterday it’s also a pretty safe bet that the champion won’t be Yale.
A fitting ending
Yesterday we said Cornell had to hold Columbia in check from the arc to hold serve on its home court. So it was beyond appropriate that on a day that saw the Lions torch the Big Red for 39.1-percent shooting from three, the contest was decided by a Dragutin Kravic three-pointer with 2.5 seconds left. In his postgame interview on WKCR, Joe Jones indicated he felt the win was the result of a trend of improved play of late for the Lions. This would be the same team that played poorly in an overtime loss at Princeton and got pounded by 32 at Penn in its previous game. No, this was a game Cornell should have won — both on paper and when you consider the Big Red had a 48-40 lead with under seven minutes left. Instead it was a potentially season-changing win for Columbia and the latest poor finish for Steve Donahue’s inconsistent team.
